Roasting, in which an article of food, usually meat or poultry, is placed in an oven is an early and still popular cooking technique.
It is common for oven roasting racks to be made from wire to provide the advantages of simple and cheap manufacture and distribution. However, a wire roast rack is often cumbersome in configuration and occupies appreciable storage space. This is a particularly troublesome problem when the racks are stored in cluttered kitchen cabinets.
When roasting a food product on a wire roast rack, it is often difficult to manipulate and remove the food product from the rack. This is due to the fact that most roasted foods are highly proteinaceous and are therefore prone to stick to a hot roasting rack. For this reason, there is a need for the removal of the food product from a rack which will not cause damage to the cooked food. Further, the heat of the oven in such methods of roasting penetrates the body cavity of the meat or other food product being roasted and thus causes the object being roasted to drip excess oils and grease onto the rack and into the pan below. Many wire racks do not provide for adequate means to allow the food product to drip off excess oils and grease, thus making cleaning of the rack difficult and affecting the taste of food product.
In addition, any roast racks made of wire tend to rust after repeated use and cleaning and its metallic properties prevent it from being used in a microwave.
Recently, microwave cooking has become a popular alternative to oven cooking. Current kitchen cookware must be able to not only withstand high temperatures but also have the capacity to operate in the microwave environment. Microwave ovens have become popular kitchen appliances and it is apparent that use of microwave ovens will continue to increase. The wire roast racks are not suitable for use in microwave ovens because wire, metal and other such materials are not microwave compatible.
Cookware does exist that has been designed specifically for use in microwave environments. Such cookware usually takes the form of a tray or pan made of microwave compatible material. However, such cookware is unsuitable for the efficient roasting of meats and the like as such cookware does not uniformly cook the meat and does not provide the means necessary to allow oils and grease to drip off the food product.
Barder, British Patent No. 1,519,776, discloses a rack in the form of two wire grids having three planes. The reference device however is not microwave compatible and buffers the disadvantages known to wire racks. Its configuration also makes it difficult to store in kitchen cabinets.
It has been discovered that polyetherimides and, in particular, polyetherimide bearing the grade designation Ultem.RTM.1000 and Ultem.RTM.1010 are virtually unaffected by microwave radiation.